Some call them mental “activators”. It is this series of habits, actions that we perform at a certain time of the day that help us stay organized and complete a series of recurring tasks. If we don’t, we feel like the day is wasted. It’s those 5 minutes of stretching, that shower, and that bedtime before breakfast.
For those of us looking to avoid distractions, an app that tracks these routines can be the difference between sticking to them or not. And I, who tried several, ended up doing without them for turning to an easier way to stick to my habits thanks to iOS 17 and watchOS 10.
Sometimes the best is the simplest
I myself interviewed the creator of one of these applications, EveryDay. A complete and motivating service that encourages you to record compliance with these routines, with an interface that rewards those who follow them the most and warns those who stray.
But it’s curious, because even though I highly recommend these types of apps to avoid addiction to social media and infinite scrolling, they never work for me. In the end, the solution that best fits my life is much simpler, more rudimentary.
What I did was write down the routines with the tasks I want to do in the morning, afternoon or evening. Reminders App Lists. No tracking, no compliance data, not even marking these reminders as recurring. I turned it into nothing more than a simple request.
For each task on the routine list, an emoji to make everything more visual and identifiable.
Because? For a very important reason: I can make this request from my Apple Watch. The moment I want to complete my set of morning routines, I simply check the corresponding reminder list on my wrist and complete the tasks in the order planned.
I don’t cross anything off when I’m done: I just know that I need to complete the tasks I see on my watch. When I finish one, I start the next one. To distinguish them clearly, each task on the list is preceded by an emoji.
If you want to get closer to a task manager, you can
In my case, I just consult the task lists, without modifying or completing them. But I can understand that there are those who prefer mark tasks or routines as completedeven if it is for a simple reason of satisfaction.
In this case, you just need to create each reminder/routine with a daily recurrence. This way when you mark it as done, will appear again as a task to be completed the next day.
Reminders don’t keep track of completed tasks, but at least this way you can see if you’ve forgotten anything just by seeing if you’re behind on completing your routines.
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